Japan: Kaitou Reinya Anime Website Taken Over by Online Casino Operators

Online casino operators are taking over disused Japanese anime websites, posing as the official sites of titles like Kaitou Reinya.

According to a report from the Japanese media outlet Otakuma, a firm that appears to represent an online casino site has allegedly ripped and cloned much of the original content from the official Kaitou Reinya website.

This firm appears to have interspersed this content with advertisements for an online casino. The site now also features clickable URL links that lead visitors to casino game platforms.

Multiple Japanese anime portals have posted warnings about the site in the past 48 hours. They have urged fans not to visit the official Kaitou Reinya site.

Kaitou Reinya, also known as Phantom Thief Reinya, is a comedy anime series. It revolves around the fictionalized antics of the entertainer and former Morning Musume star member Tanaka Reina.

Kaitou Reinya Anime Website: Taken Over by Casino Ads

The series aired on Kyushu Asahi Broadcasting between January and March 2010, at the height of Reina’s fame.

It tells the tale of a female convenience store clerk who moonlights as a treasure-hunting “phantom thief,” with an inept trio of police detectives trying to catch her red-handed.

In the years after its release, the website effectively fell dormant, and its domain license expired in May 2020.

Advertisers or casino operators appear to have taken note, snapping up the license shortly after. They then took control of the website, using images of the anime characters. The media outlet wrote: “This has all made it difficult to tell at first glance that the site is a fake.”

Japanese anime fans claim to have discovered more unused anime sites that online casino operators have acquired.

The X user @yamanashirei wrote that the same fate has befallen the official site of the Rokka no Yuusha (Rokka Braves of The Six Flowers) series.

This website now features a blog post that promotes online casinos. Yamanashirei said the post claims: “There is a good chance a casino game based on Rokka no Yuusha is forthcoming.”

The same user wrote elsewhere that it was “now quite common to find that the domain of an old anime site has been bought and turned into a page that advertises online casinos.”

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Otakuma also reported that the domain used as the official website for the 2019 animated film Y School Heroes Movie (aka Yokai Academy Y: Can a Cat Become a Hero?) was bought by a third party in July 2021. This site also “now features posts related to online casinos,” the outlet explained.

The report’s author noted that this kind of domain takeover was not limited to the anime and entertainment industries. The same phenomenon was also becoming common on corporate websites and celebrity blog sites.

Visiting online casinos from Japanese territory is considered a criminal offense. Police and public prosecutors have begun a sweeping crackdown on celebrities and sports stars who use their smartphones to access online casinos.

Last week, prosecutors in Saitama decided against indicting the baseball stars Shuta Tonosaki, Sena Tsuge, Ryosuke Kodama, and Shinya Hasegawa. The quartet all play for the Saitama Seibu Lions in Japan’s pro baseball league. All four confessed to gambling on their smartphones.